Monday, February 3, 2014

There is something achingly beautiful
and yet flat out achy when it comes to decayed movie theaters. Once
upon a time, not that long ago in fact, going to the movies was an
epic and occasionally glamorous thing. Even when I was a little girl
in the 80's, with the glory days of the palatial, gilded frame movie
houses being long, long gone, the theater was still a magical place.
Sure, the movie theater in question was realistically a ratty dollar
theater attached to a strip mall, probably built in the early to mid
70's, but for a kid, it was the closest thing I had to a living
remnant to an era of film that I only knew via large film books with
yellowy pages.

Of course, it helps that this was right
before the stinky hand of commercials had infiltrated the movie going
experience and even at a pee-stenched theater whose glory days were
dubious from inception, the stained red curtains parted like the red
seas when the trailers began. It's a seemingly small gesture but it
was all part of the dingy majesty for me.

The small town I grew up in actually
did have a proper, non strip-mall attached theater too. The Apollo
Theater, nestled in the historic and semi-neglected as long as I can
remember historic downtown area, was always there. Doing research,
they were showing kids films when I was a toddler and before then,
adult films. Before that? I'm not sure, but what I do know is that it
is still there. All but practically condemned and rotting from the
inside, the Apollo now has all the appearance of waiting to die.
Which is a shame. Beyond a shame but the structure, still there after
decades of growth and Appleby's, gives a faint shadow of hope that
maybe someone will rescue it. Just because something is neglected,
doesn't necessarily mean it has to die.

The other night, as I was trying to
work on the above passage, I got sucked into one of the most recent
episodes of The Rialto Report and their fantastic interview with
Veronica Vera. There was something about this particular interview
that, by the end, hit me emotionally. Here's this amazing woman, who
is so classy, smart and someone who has made an incredible thumbprint
in this world by being so open to new frontiers, both in terms of
sexuality, as well as writing and gender. We live in a culture where
the accepted image of someone being open and outside the status quo
fray is “Dharma & Greg” or whatever “manic-pixie”
mainstream dream machine you want to invoke. Accepted risks are
buying a faux African-patterned skirt from a store at the mall. But
Vera, along with many of her peers and the subjects of Rialto's other
interviews, took real risks.

It's incredibly weird to me that it is
2014, a number so Jetson-sounding in its futurism, that things like
“slut shaming” and overall stunted attitudes towards human
expression involving sexuality are still alive and well. Kind of like
that small militant army of cockroaches that live underneath your
kitchen sink, outdated morals refuse to die in our culture. And
that's part of why I do what I do. Outdated mores tend to blind
people to art. A chaste female nude is considered auto-art by some,
but yet the moment that nude gets to derive pleasure from something
more than just the male gaze, it's smut and therefore, not deemed
respectable or worth examining. This is beyond ridiculous. Attitudes
like this should be relegated to the same kind of snickering we save
for things like medicinal leeches and the belief that the devil is
tied to mental illness.

With our culture, it's not just simply
about out-moded puritanism but classism too. It eternally mystifies
me that guys like Gerard Damiano, Cecil Howard or Stephen Sayadian
are all but labeled pornographers but their European/Asian
counterparts like Oshima, Breillat and most recently, “Nymphomaniac”
director Lars von Trier are deemed artists. And you know what? They
ARE artists but so are Damiano, Howard and Sayadian. But the key
difference between the latter three and the former is that the latter
are not only American, but worked in a milieu that is considered to
be the bottom rung of the bread and circuses ladder. The more
lower-class a medium is perceived, the more derided, if not flat out
neglected, it is. Which is strange. Shouldn't this be the enlightened
age? It's okay to have a film display raw human sad emotion but
sexuality is still taboo?